Notes on China

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Last week, I spent two weeks in China. I visited Beijing, Chengdu, Amisham, Chongqing, Qinghai, and Hangzhou. I went because, look, the big thing I tried to figure out on this podcast is what's happening in AI. And the biggest unknown variable there is what's going to happen in China. I don't yet have the answer to this question. This trip was a beginning of my curiosity about the country and not the capstone. But as I learn more about China over the coming months, I hope to share what I learn with you. Scale. It's funny how China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. We can't rebuild fallen bridges. They build bridges to nowhere. In the most desirable cities in this country, every random Victorian house and park bench is a historic site that can't be disturbed. There, they'll bulldoze a 500-year-old temple to build an endless skyscraper complex that nobody wants to live in. My overwhelming first impression was, wow, everything is so fucking big. The cities themselves, the train stations, the airports, the towering, and endless apartment complexes. Travel often teaches you things about a country which you honestly should have intuited even without visiting. Obviously, I knew that China is a big country, with over 1.4 billion people. But the stupendous scale of the biggest cities was impressed upon me only after I visited. Even in Emisham, a city of just half a million people, which is considered honestly a quaint countryside town by Chinese standards, we found a Buddhist temple of comical scale. We'd enter what seemed like an impressively large compound, only to discover that it was merely the entrance to an even grander structure right behind it. This pattern was repeated five or six times, each subsequent building larger and more ornate than the last, like some sort of inverse nesting doll. And the place had almost no other visitors, by the way. I asked a monk at the temple how they funded this massive site in a city of just half a million people. He told us that it was simply through donations. We probed further about how such an enormous project could have been financed by just ordinary people's contributions. He responded, We've got a lot of supporters, dude, and changed the topic. Chongqing is by far the coolest city I've ever visited. It's this insane cyberpunk multi-level metropolis with over 20 million people. I wouldn't begin to know how to describe it, but there's a bunch of great YouTube videos which will show you what I mean. I got a really nice two-floor hotel room that overlooked two rivers and one of the most insane skylines in the world for 60 bucks. I'd highly recommend visiting Chongqing if you get the chance. In 1995, astronomers pointed Hubble at a seemingly empty patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Instead of emptiness, the 10-day exposure revealed over 3,000 galaxies. Every speck of light in the image was an entire galaxy containing billions of stars. When I went to top the tallest building in Chongqing and looked over the city, I thought about that Hubble image. You could zoom in on any direction, and you'd find, behind the fog in the mist, beyond even perhaps the horizon, another skyscraper, each containing hundreds or thousands of people living and working.
We took a 12-hour train ride from Chongqing to Shanghai. I'm embarrassed to say that my only experience with the actual countryside was via the windows of this train. Still, the sights were quite interesting. We saw, again and again, small paddy farms surrounding a handful of 5-10 story skyscrapers, plopped in the seeming middle of nowhere. Even in the countryside, it seems that many people prefer to live in large buildings instead of their own small homes. I couldn't top off the train and confirm, but I saw many towns that looked quite ghostly, with no actually visible people anywhere. Outside of Beijing and Shanghai, and sometimes even within, you can tell that these skyscrapers were put up by a country with a GDP per capita of $10,000, and potentially half or quarter that when many of these buildings went up. America and Europe put up a ton of beautiful buildings in the early 20th century, when their GDP per capita was similar to China's. One could even argue that those other structures are more aesthetic than anything we're building today in the West. Not so in China. These endless rows of skyscrapers put up in the construction frenzy of the last few decades are ugly, boxes of mostly concrete with visible blight and discoloration all over them. If the great construction binge is indeed over, it'll be a shame that China's infrastructure was built out during a period of particularly uninspired architecture. Beijing's urban design looks like something straight out of James Scott's Seeing Like a State. The city is dominated by these enormous apartment complexes, blocks of 10 adjacent 30-story buildings demarcated by 8-lane roads. The government buildings follow the same pattern, huge structures divided by extremely wide boulevards. This layout seems designed partly for social control. During zero COVID, authorities would lock down tens of thousands of people by simply guarding a few entrance gates. The wide roads would also make it easy to move military forces throughout the city. The only break from this pattern are the Hutongs, Beijing's old historic neighborhoods. But even these weren't spared completely. Only a small fraction survived Beijing's rapid modernization push. Dare I say that Beijing is too yinbi? Vibes. I got quite mixed messages about the state of public opinion in China. And this is to be expected in a society where you can't establish common knowledge. One person told me that the new generation is quite nationalistic, unlike the older reform generation, which personally experienced both the catastrophes of Mao and also the tangible benefits of liberalization. He made the rather insightful point that this tilt in public opinion in China increasingly gives a lie to the American talking point that we're against the CCP but not the Chinese people. In fact, he went on to say that the current regime is way more liberal than what would result from an actual election in China. Another person told me that these Chinese nationalists were only a vocal minority, similar to the Wokes in America circa 2020 While they make up only 10% of the population, they aggressively shout down others on Weibo, which is China's equivalent of Twitter. Most people find them annoying, but feel uncomfortable confronting them directly. And this matches what a student who just graduated from a top university there told me, that the vast majority of his classmates are simply apolitical. And in our own interactions with locals, we saw little evidence of why it's for a nationalism or something. And in fact, one of my Chinese-speaking trip-mate would mention that he is from the UK to our taxi drivers. They would often respond quite enthusiastically. They'd say, we love the UK. There were very few foreigners. In Beijing, I might have seen half a dozen cumulatively across entire seas of people. In Chengdu and Chongqing, I barely remember seeing any. And this is a real shame, of course, because Chongqing is, again, a truly incredible destination to go visit. So rare, apparently, are tourists that we repeatedly got asked for selfies in Chengdu and Chongqing. Outside of Shanghai, almost nobody spoke English. And if I went again, I would definitely try to crash course some basic Chinese beforehand. This language barrier did lead to some interesting encounters. In a park in Chengdu, we met an old man who was reading a textbook, which said medical English at the top of it. And he asked us to join him for some tea. I think he was just trying to practice his English. He said he loved foreigners, and that his favorite period in life was the 80s and 90s, when, of course, their reforms kicked off. And he told me that he loved ding.